Effectiveness of treatment acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on the reduction of depressive symptoms of military personnel with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Diabetes is a widespread and progressive disease. Patients experience different emotional and physical disorders during treatment and after it. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of treatment ACT on the reduction of depressive symptoms of military personnel with type 2 diabetes.
This quasi-experimental clinical trial was conducted between control and experimental groups by proposing pre-test, post-test, and follow-up. Totally, 60 patients with type 2 diabetes who went to a military hospital were evaluated using the DASS-21 depression scale and structured interview (DSM-IV-TR). Among the participants that their depression scores in this test were higher than cut-off point average (≥14), 30 individuals were selected randomly and divided into two groups: experimental (n=15) and control group (n=15). Eight sessions of intervention of ACT were held (two individual sessions and six group sessions) for experimental group and no clinical intervention was performed for control group during the study. In order to analysis of data, analysis of variance with repeated measurements was performed using SPSS-22 software.
Our findings showed that during eight sessions of intervention and three-month follow-up, scores of the experimental group had a significant reduction than the control group (p The results of this research showed that ACT can be effective on decreasing depressive symptoms of military personnel with type 2 diabetes